New build for "Engineering" friend

This is going to be a replacement for his 5 year old daily driver, and he wants this to last another 5 years.

Reliability and energy efficiency are at the top of his list, with some gaming in mind (10% of the time he predicts) he says his current dual AMD MP CPU rig uses up to 60% CPU power just downloading stuff which seems kind of odd to me, but he says it’s because there are 400 items sitting in his cue. It may see some occasional light duty CAD/CFD/CATIA use, but he has several other dedicated systems for that.

Bang for the buck is very important also, he wants to keep the budget around 1k, but is flexible if the cost can be justified...Overclocking is not really a priority for him, but I will pay a visit to him down the road and tweak it up for him (He's in a different state)

His choice for a GPU is the 9800GX2 given the amount of performance for the low price today, it's hard to argue against, though I think a GTX 260 would be fine for his needs (Gaming wise) and would really simplify the build and get the power numbers way down since the GX-2 is a power hog even at idle, which is my argument against this GPU since this system will idle allot and be on 24/7.

He really liked the idea of the NVIDA Hybrid Power, but it is only on AMD boards so far, and he didn’t want to take the 30% loss in performance. We did consider it for a time, he’s not going wait for 45nm versions it seems.

So far the GPU is about the only thing we have locked into (Though arguments for alternatives under 250$ would be considered)

Chipset is likely to be P45, I don’t see any need to go for a X38/X48, for the slight gain in performance. The P45 has plenty of things going for it, I really like its power saving features.

I have taking a liking to the new "Gigabyte Ultra Durable" boards like the GA-EP45-UD3P as they seem to be reviewing pretty well, I also looked at the thread here at XS on it.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16813128358

CPU is to be the Q9550 45nm Yorkfield, I told him it has 4ghz potential, but if it’s overclocked at all, it will be at stock voltage and in the 3.2-3.6ghz range. It will have EIST enabled to keep power use down when idling, he thinks the stock 2.8ghz should be more then enough for his needs though.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16819115041

Power supply choice is a bit of a stickler for us, I prefer single rail 12v rails myself from past personal experiences a while back, but maybe things have changed since then.
The GX2 requires a 8 pin connector, I think the PC Power & Cooling 610w should be fine with an adapter, but if someone knows something about that, I would like to hear about it.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16817703005

He wants a reasonably priced case, I suggested one with a 250mm side panel fan for good cooling with that vid card, so far its the Enermax Chakra for 69$

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16811124114

He is also going to be using SAS for his storage subsystem rather than SATA. He has a lot of experience with that sort of system, BUT as a result of this, the board will have to have at least two PCIe slots. He says that the MINIMUM is one PCIe x16 slot and one PCIe x8 slot. Two slots, both running at x16 would be preferable, but that’s at least the minimum requirement.